Monday, January 25, 2010

Echolocation in dolphins and bats evolved separately, but through the same genetic changes.

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Dolphins and bats have both evolved the same specialized form of inner-ear hair cells that allow them to use sophisticated echolocation: detecting unseen obstacles or tracking down prey by making a high frequency noise and listening for the echo that bounces back.

"The natural world is full of examples of species that have evolved similar characteristics independently" said Stephen Rossiter. "However, it is generally assumed that most of these so-called 'convergent traits' have arisen by different changes in the animal's DNA. Our study shows that this very complex ability - echolocation - has in fact evolved by identical genetic changes in bats and dolphins."

According to Rossiter, the discovery represents an "unprecedented" example of convergence between two very different animals, and suggests that further studies might unearth more genetic similarities between species than scientists would have suspected. link

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Karel Čapek (Jan. 9, 1890 – Dec. 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. He introduced and made popular the frequently used international word robot, which first appeared in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1921.

The word robot comes from the word robota meaning literally serf labor, and, figuratively, "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech, Slovak and Polish. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude" ("work" in contemporary Russian), which in turn comes from the Indo-European root *orbh-.

While it is frequently thought that Karel Čapek was the originator of the word, he wrote a short letter in reference to an article in the Oxford English Dictionary etymology in which he named his brother, Josef Čapek, as its actual inventor. From Wiki